Fantagraphics

Tue, Sep 20, 2005

The advance list for Fantagraphics January is now available for your perusing delight on the graphic novel site. There are two BLAB! Storybooks, both of which give the (misleading) appearance of being aimed at children but are really for adults: The Magic Bottle by Camille Rose Garcia which sounds like a fetching modern fairy tale take on environmental and consumerist woes and Struwwelpeter and Other Disturbing Tales for Human Beings by Bob Staake.

I’m sure some of you are familiar with Der Struwwelpeter, a delightfully creepy folk tale from Germany. This new set of tales looks to be very much in the mode of macabre delights such as Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies; being a big fan of Edward Gorey and Charles Addams I think I may have to read this myself. Just the thing to read as a bedtime story to small children on a dark, winter’s night… Then leg it and leave their parents to deal with the trauma!

There are also three new entries in Fantagraphics’ Ignatz Series. Now these aren’t quite comics nor are they graphic novels; as Fantagraphics puts it themselves, they are somewhere in-between. This gave us pause for thought – should we list them on the graphic novel site? Hmmm. Well, we looked at them and since they look like fine examples of some of the excellent comic book art that Fantagraphics have a knack for we decided we would. We reasoned our readers would also be interested in these titles and, to be honest, we want to read them too, so in they go!

The three Ignatz titles due in January are Interiorae 1 from Gabriella Giandelli, Ganges 1 from Kevin Huizenga and Chimera 1 from one of my favourite artists, Lorenzo Mattotti, who produced the astonishing adaptation of R L Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde a few years ago. I think the low price and unusual format will make these works affordable and accessible to new readers, so please do have a browse.